


Call Off Your Ghost

by follow_the_sun



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Based on a Tumblr Post, Gen, Ghost Hunting AU, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Protective Bucky Barnes, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 00:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5070436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was no surprise to anyone that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were partnered to challenge and eliminate hostile spirits. But everybody thought that Steve would be the Speaker and Bucky would be the Fighter.</p><p>Everybody thought wrong. </p><p>(Ghost-hunter AU oneshot)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call Off Your Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> So I ran across a post by [allofthefeelings:](http://allofthefeelings.tumblr.com/post/131680478195/i-just-had-the-worlds-most-amazing-fandom-dream)
> 
> "I just had the world’s most amazing fandom dream, where the artificial concept drawing people into state-mandated relationships was not D/s or A/B/O or whatever, but rather ghost hunting and who could fight ghosts had to be paired with who could communicate with them (no one was both) and the rituals involved making a scythe to prove devotion.  
> It makes no sense whatsoever and I do not care one bit.  
>  _I would read a billion words of this AU._ "
> 
> Well, apparently, so would I.

From the time they were kids, it was obvious to anybody with eyes that Steve and Bucky were a matched pair of Hunters. They’d both started seeing ghosts around the same time they met each other, which was a heck of a giveaway right there. Started getting in fights around the same time, too, and soon it was clear that it was more than ordinary schoolyard scrapping—after a while it got so Bucky would look up in the middle of doing something else, pause for a second, and light out across the playground (or, later, all the way across Brooklyn), and whoever he’d been with at the time would shrug and say, “The Rogers kid,” and sure enough, Bucky would get there just in time to save Steve from another beating. Nobody was surprised when they tested into the Program a full year earlier than all but the most gifted kids, or when the tests showed an almost unheard-of level of compatibility between them.

So the first time the Program sent them up against a hostile subject—the experience you couldn’t replace, the one that sealed the bond between a Speaker and a Fighter forever—nobody was surprised that they located the hostile spirit entity in record time, and nobody was surprised that when the Speaker gave the challenge, the HSE flew at them like a literal bat out of hell, with a level of speed and aggression indicating that even it knew it was up against an unusually powerful threat.

The part nobody expected was that Bucky turned out to be the Speaker.

Between them they managed to put the HSE back in the grave it had come from, but barely, and while Steve was lying in the hospital in critical condition, the men in the suits came to Bucky and explained that they were sorry, son, they were so very sorry, but they just couldn’t risk putting the pair of them back in the field. Not a Fighter who had asthma and a heart murmur and flat feet and God knew what else. And it wasn’t fair, son, all of them knew it wasn’t fair, not after the way he’d worked and trained and aced every test they’d given him, but no Speaker had ever been successfully paired with another Fighter after the critical first battle, and the government just didn’t have the resources to repeat all the failed experiments they’d already undertaken to see if it would go differently with him, not with a war on and the rumors about the Krauts using some kind of red demon to unleash all kinds of new HSEs in Berlin.

Bucky lowered his eyes and nodded, and said he understood, and somehow managed to wait until they all left the room before he put his head down and wept with relief.

It was the escape hatch he’d spent five years looking for.

Him in the field would’ve been okay, even though Bucky knew what the odds were for Fighters. The ones who made it past their twenty-fifth birthday were rare exceptions. The ones who made it to thirty retired, along with their Speakers, as heroes. But the Speakers’ physical training was almost as rigorous, for one blindingly obvious reason. They had to be able to issue the challenge and then _run away._

Steve never ran from a fight in his life. Bucky had absolutely no doubt that if he’d fallen, Steve would’ve been right there behind him, picking up the scythe, and there would’ve been two corpses cooling on the pavement shortly after.

So Bucky never resented Steve for it, not when the government men told them they could have a small stipend in light of their legal status as Hunters, but not the outlandish salaries and high pensions that both their families were counting on; not when Bucky wound up working at the docks, and Steve, with his chronic cough and shaking hands, usually couldn’t find work at all; not when Bucky’s girlfriend left him for a “real” Hunter, which would’ve been a bad enough slap in the face even if it hadn’t been a Fighter she replaced him with; and not when they walked down the streets of Brooklyn and everybody gave them looks that weren’t pride anymore, but pity, or even a misplaced kind of shame. Bucky could never get Steve to believe that far from being angry, he hadn’t been this happy since they both went into the Program.

Steve’s lopsided smile faded until Bucky could hardly remember it. Lately he’d been starting fights deliberately, instead of stumbling into them. He even applied to the mundane Army—not content to 4F out once, he managed to do it _four times_ before Bucky couldn’t take it anymore. “They’ll catch you, or worse, they’ll _take_ you,” he said, and when he heard those words come out of his own mouth, he knew what he had to do.

He reported Steve’s enlistment attempts to the Program.

The men in the suits listened, with every appearance of deep concern, and they reassured Bucky that the one thing the Program stood by was its lifetime commitment to its people, even the ones who were no longer on active Hunting duty. He made them give him their word that Steve wouldn’t get in trouble for this, and they promised to send someone around the next day who would take care of everything. Bucky wasn’t sure if that meant the military police, to threaten Steve with criminal charges if he tried it again, or a psychiatrist, to jolt Steve out of his recent self-destructiveness. But the truth was, at that point he didn’t care; he just wanted Steve to _stop fighting already._

He realized his mistake when the man who turned up at the door was Abraham Erskine.

 

So now Bucky is sweating and clenching his fists so hard his nails dig into his palms and draw half-circles of blood, and Steve is inside the machine, and at 70% power, Steve is _screaming_ and Bucky can’t take it anymore. He jumps up and yells, _“For God’s sake, turn it off”_ at Howard Stark—his new third-least-favorite person behind Erskine, who came up with this insane idea that maybe they _don’t_ have to wash failed pairs out of the Program after all, and Phillips, head of the Program, who approved it—and Steve shouts back, “No! I can take it,” and Bucky is thinking _This is my fault, this is all my fault,_ and he has no idea what he’s going to see when the door opens, and for a minute he can’t look.

And then, for another minute, he can’t stop looking.

Steve is… Steve is… What the hell happened to the skinny little punk who went into the machine ten minutes ago? And who the hell is this six-foot-two giant, with rock-hard muscles glistening all over with sweat? For a minute he can’t believe it’s happening, has to be some kind of crazy dream, that’s all there is to it. And then Steve opens his eyes, his same blue eyes, and Bucky goes over the barricade they told him to wait behind, grabbing Steve by his suddenly ridiculously broad shoulders and wanting to shake him, wanting to scream at him that this is the dumbest thing the dumb little punk has ever done in his dumb life, but all that comes out of his mouth is, “How do you feel?”

“Taller,” Steve says, and suddenly, his mouth twists into a grin. “They did it, Buck.”

“You did it, Steve,” Bucky says, and if anybody asks, he’ll say he means it as a compliment. All he can think, though, is that it means… It means they can really be Hunters now, a Fighter and a Speaker tracking down HSEs together as God and the Program intended.

It means that he and Steve are going to war.

It’s a long time before Bucky can even find the words to respond, but when he does, it isn’t what he was expecting to come out of his mouth—not any more than it was during that fateful first encounter, when the challenge ripped out of him before he could stop it.

“Well,” he says, “I guess I better get some whatchacallit, vibranium, and start making you a goddamn scythe already.”

“Actually,” Steve says, “I kind of had a different thought about that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "Call Off Your Ghost" by Dessa.
> 
> [The Tumblr post for this fic is [here](http://follow-the-sun-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/146675884630/call-off-your-ghost-followthesun-captain).]


End file.
